Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff Page A

earth. But just as the seeds of mysticism were firmly embedded in modem epistemology from the outset, so was their counterpart in modern ethics. The Christian passion for self-sacrifice had pervaded the Western soul, penetrating to the root of the philosophers’ sense of good and evil.
    In one respect, however, the moderns reinterpreted the Christian viewpoint. Jesus had commanded man first to love God and then as a consequence to love his neighbor. In accordance with the secular spirit of their era, modern philosophers inverted this hierarchy. Hesitantly, then confidently, then routinely, they downplayed the supernatural element in Christianity and emphasized the virtue of service to society. As God waned in the eyes of the moralists of sacrifice, the neighbor waxed.
    How were men to combine the nascent Greek egoism with the ethics of sacrifice? They were advised by most thinkers to reach some kind of compromise or “harmony” between the two. The dominant idea of a proper harmony is eloquently indicated by Adam Smith, the Christian champion of laissez-faire, who was also one of the Enlightenment’s leading moralists.
    It is not true, Smith writes, “that a regard to the welfare of society should be the sole virtuous motive of action, but only that in any competition it ought to cast the balance against all other motives.”
    Assuming that a man is honest and industrious, says Smith, his pursuit of his self-interest “is regarded as a most respectable and even, in some degree, as an amiable and agreeable quality....” Nevertheless, Smith goes on, “it never is considered as one either of the most endearing or of the most ennobling of the virtues. It commands a certain cold esteem, but seems not entitled to any very ardent love or admiration.”
    What is entitled to “ardent love”?
The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty of which it is only a subordinate part: he should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings of which God himself is the immediate administrator and director. 9
    In their deepest hearts, whatever their intellectual attempts at “harmony,” the Enlightenment moralists (deists included) remain Christians, not medieval saints urging self-mortification, but modern “moderates” who are content to tolerate the self—and eager to extol its piecemeal abnegation. Man’s ego, in their eyes, is not a demon to be exorcised, but a homely stepchild to be dutifully awarded “a certain cold esteem,” before one proceeds to the realm of “ardent love or admiration,” the truly moral realm: self-sacrifice. It is as if the philosophers of the period render reluctantly unto Aristotle the things that are Aristotle‘s, but joyously unto Augustine the things that are Augustine’s—and the things of Augustine are everything of importance.
    An age of moral moderates is always a period of historical transition, a prelude to an age of moral extremism, as the dominant element in the compromise progressively gains ascendancy. The collapse of the Enlightenment moralists’ precarious structure waited only for the extremist to appear.
    The moralist who would not permit them to have man’s ego and eat it, too, was Kant. Kant put an end to the Enlightenment in ethics as he had done in epistemology. His method was to unleash the code of self-sacrifice in its pure form, purged of the last remnants of the Greek influence.
    The motor behind Hitler was not men’s immorality or amorality; it was the Germans’ obedience to morality —as defined by their nation’s leading moral